I’ve been getting asked for recommendations for guides recently, not guidebooks but guides tourists can hire to show them around a place. Other than specialist guides – for example, a culinary expert, a naturalist or an architecture or art historian, I don’t recommend them. Why? Because I believe guides get in the way of a … Read more about 5 good reasons not to use a guide
If there’s one destination above all else in the world where you want to explore alone, and don’t want to be tagging along behind a blathering guide – or want a guide trailing along behind you (read this post for an explanation) – it’s the Dead Cities of Syria. Serjilla, Al Bara, Jerada, and Ruweiha … Read more about Doing it alone at the Dead Cities
Guides, as I wondered in my last post, who uses them? My aversion to hiring guides is largely due to the distance they put between me and my travel experience. I mean, think back to the last time you had a truly memorable travel moment. The first time you saw the Giza Pyramids, Palmyra, Baalbek … Read more about Guides: getting in the way of a good travel experience
Guides. How many people use them I wonder. Do you? And I don’t mean travel guidebooks. Nor the guides who take package tour groups around. And not the specialist guides who lead treks through mountains, jungles, glaciers and other hard-to-get places we might not otherwise have access to. I mean the personal guides who people … Read more about Guides: who needs them?
We generally don’t like guides – mainly, it’s their bad jokes, the tedious history lessons, the time-keeping mentality, and a certain arrogance, plus we’ve had a few bad experiences (one of which involved our first visit to one of the world’s great wonders, Petra, being ruined by the guide). However, we visited several food markets … Read more about The Joys of Travel: Food Markets, part 2 (a case for hiring guides)